Global Business Intelligence Initiatives: 7 Critical Success Factors (By Murali Nandini)

In the current competitive business environment, leveraging the information assets of an organization is key to building successful global business enterprises of the future. This need has driven multiple global organizations to spend millions of dollars on business intelligence/data warehousing (BI/DW) solutions, but most of these initiatives have yielded less than expected return on investment (ROI) as they have failed to identify and address the critical aspects influencing the outcome of these BI initiatives.

Aspects like management commitment, scope management, end-user involvement, project team skills and use of appropriate methodology are critical for ensuring success of any large-scale global projects. But in addition to the above, for a global BI initiative organizations have to address key challenges like resistance from regional/local users, sustenance of good data quality, scalability of data model and architecture, ongoing maintenance and enhancements, and increasing cost of support. Hence, it is critical to define an execution approach that addresses these key challenges.

There are 7 key factors that determine the success of a global BI implementation. Organizations planning to roll out global BI programs need to plan, incorporate and track these factors to be able to minimize the risks of failure.




The Seven Critical Success Factors


  1. Balancing Global versus Local Requirements: In a global BI initiative, one of the most important aspects to be addressed is the extent of localization flexibility provided in the solution design. An understanding of information requirements at both global and local levels and at corporate and business unit levels has to be captured. While one may take the approach of defining the requirements through a top-down approach (global requirements perspective), it also needs to be closely tied in by a bottom-up approach (local requirements perspective). Lack of this process leads to a spawning of island systems to meet comprehensive information needs and takes away the advantages that are expected in the global BI initiative. Non-compliance to this process will lead to unsatisfied end-customers, and the initiative will not have the buy-in from the local end-user team.

  2. Focus on Data Quality and Stewardship: The most complex attribute in implementing a large BI solution is data quality, and this needs to be ensured through a rigorously implemented data stewardship structure. Organizations need to identify data owners at regional/local level for creation of region-specific master data and should have a centralized team that ensures alignment to corporate guidelines and standards before approving the data migration to downstream BI applications. However, the approval time should be minimal to ensure regional/local business needs can be met in a timely manner.

  3. Flexibility of the Data Model: The data model is at the heart of any BI program. Ensuring scalability of a data model that changes and adapts to a rapidly dynamic environment is a critical requirement in any BI program. In the case of a global BI program, the expectations are significantly higher. Even when utilizing an industry-standard data model, it is very important to do the due diligence and ensure that all outlier scenarios have been evaluated because the cost involved in changing the structure is very high.

  4. Architecture Focus on Standardization, Reusability & Automation: In any globally scaled system automation, a critical aspect is to take care of standardization, and this should be an area of key focus for the initiative. Implementing global standards without an armory of reusable components is a huge challenge, and the initiative also needs to have an unflinching focus on developing reusable components to aid this activity. Reusability also becomes a critical aspect in ensuring that the time to market and efforts are reduced as the initiative progresses.

  5. Depth of Process and Data Knowledge: It is imperative to ensure that the execution team understands the business processes, process nuances and the underlying data. This understanding is critical when delivering a global project. The ramifications of making a change at a later point in time will result in huge amount of data validation that will need to be performed.

  6. Complexity in Dependency Management: The extent of dependencies in a global BI initiative is substantially higher. Considering the fact that the global BI initiatives are heavily dependent on various global and local upstream source systems, MDM etc., it is important that the interdependencies are closely managed. Before initiating global BI initiatives, organizations should identify potential changes/enhancements that are planned to be implemented in the near future in both upstream and downstream applications and assess the potential impact of those changes. The implementation program plan should ensure that no major changes/enhancements are being carried out during the critical phases of the global BI program.

  7. Oversight of Operational Challenges (Context of 24X7 Infrastructure): This is an often neglected dimension when thinking through BI solutions at a global level. The sequencing and the failover planning, for instance, are extremely important in the case of a global infrastructure as the loading and reporting will be happening simultaneously.

Source: http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/16230